"The problem is in the fact that there are influences, but they don't show up in 'dirt archaeology.' Basically, they show up in ideological materials: mythology, astronomy, calendrics. These are precisely the areas which are hardest to deal with archaeologically. And so they don't get much attention from traditional archaeologists." -- University of Calgary professor emeritus of archaeology David H. Kelley[1]

Not everyone believes archaeology should control archaeoastronomy.[2][3] Such dissension irritates many archaeologists, anthropologists and university academics who presume themselves the primary and indisputable authorities over a field of science, hybridized and compromised. Archaeology and astronomy are strange bedfellows embracing diametrically opposite perspectives and data points. The first hunches over, looking down and sifting the terra firma for answers and artifacts; the second gazes ever farther into space for myriad intangibles and insights into the wonder of the universe. Astronomy is visionary and dynamic, frequently updating its knowledge base. In 2006, while the International Astronomical Union (IAU) was redefining our solar system, TIME magazine scolded archaeology for "a dogma that has kept it in an intellectual straitjacket since Franklin Roosevelt was President".[4] This dogma is a widely-defended institutional belief within archaeology and its parent science, anthropology, that there has been no pre-Columbian trans-oceanic contact with North America except for a short encampment by Vikings about a millenium ago at L'Anse aux Meadows, Newfoundland. Dennis Stanford, the Smithsonian's chief archaeologist and his Solutrean hypothesis have rattled most of his colleagues. Stanford has been studying artifacts in strata below the eleven-thousand-year-old layer of the first Clovis points found in all of the lower 48 states and much of Central America. This points to a European presence in America at least five thousand years ahead of human migration via the Bering land bridge. Stanford understands his unorthodox investigations invite institutional intimidation: "When you dig deeper than Clovis a lot of people do not report it because they're worried about the reaction of their colleagues."[5] Furthermore, entrenched resistance to diffusionism (regardless of whether it came 16,000 years ago or between the time of Christ and Columbus) may have suppressed other evidence unsupportive of the status quo. Have AmerIndian ethnographies been cherry-picked to validate only those 1500 to 2500-year-old archaeoastronomy constructs meeting archaeology's litmus test for an indigenous origin? Native American activist Vine Deloria, Jr., a member of the Standing Rock Sioux tribe of North Dakota and a professor at the University of Colorado, believes it's a case of reverse racism:

There's no effort to ask the tribes what they remember of things that happened. Numerous tribes do say that strange people doing this or that came through our land, visited us, and so on. Or they remember that we came across the Atlantic as refugees from some struggle, then came down the St. Lawrence River, and so forth. There's a great reluctance among archaeologists and anthropologists to break centuries-old doctrine and to take a look at something new.[1]

So, when archaeologists reject claims of non-indigenous archaeoastronomy in America, their reasoning probably has nothing whatsoever to do with the archaeoastronomy. The only issue that matters --- and indeed that fails such claims --- is its non-indigenousness. CBS News documented twin examples in Colorado and Oklahoma suggestive of Celtic archaeoastronomy on the spring equinox of 1987.[6] Astronomer Rollin Gillespie who was instrumental in launching NASA, helped design the Saturn V rocket engines for the Apollo mission, and was lead mathematician in plotting the S-curved trans lunar injection trajectories that sent men to the moon and safely returned them to earth, volunteered in interpreting and validating some unconventional archaeoastronomy in southeastern Colorado and the Oklahoma panhandle in the mid-1980s.[7] So from a political standpoint, irregardless of the volume of academic papers and static generated by archaeologists relative to the diminutive numbers of thoughtful astronomers who display an interest in this hybrid field, the perspectives of an astronomer may serve to better judge some evidence than the perspectives of those who refuse to exhibit any genuine intellectual curiosity or scientific impartiality regarding evidence they refuse to accept as possible.